uS THE ASCENT OF BALLADS

fed by selective editions such as the old collectors used to make,
and such as Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch has offered in the Oxford
Book of Ballads. Still, the ballad is not to be identified with its
happiest examples any more than with some supposititious arche-
type, for its real life lies inward. It lives in all its variants, exquisite
or crude, as an urge and pattern of creation. 'Mens agitat molem/
In some countries, such as Russia, the essential ballad is hard to
discern; it is little more than suggestion of adventure and character,
a sketch which the singer fills out with his traditional resources.
He wishes not to innovate, but to remember; and it is seldom, as
Principal Halliday has remarked in the passage quoted above, that
any version is through and through admirable. The music falters;
it'falters and lingers unfinished in the memory, which seeks the
chord that would close the song. Ballads are the 'Capelas Imper-
feitas', the unfinished chapels, of literature and challenge the great
word-builders to complete them. They have been completed by
the greatest, who have composed definitive "ballad-like poems that
no one ventures to refashion; yet the broken accents and lisping
charm of the ballads remain, inviting new creation.

Free as the ballads are, however, in content and execution, the
Ballad is Form. In some countries this form is precise, invariable,
and almost tyrannous. It becomes a metrical pattern, like the
Castilian octosyllable, which imposes itself on all sorts of material,
extinguishing its predecessors. A country which develops a
'romancero', a corporate sense of its ballads, usually develops a
precise metrical and stylistic technique. But apart from this
uniformity to the eyes, ballad poetry has its inward formalism.
Human life becomes a pattern with an expected design running
through; experience has its proper rhythm. The adventure the
poet has to relate follows a prescribed course. If it be a Russian
adventure, it will as likely as not begin with a feast in Golden
Vladimir's court, reaching the point when the guests are flushed
with wine, and some hasty words are said which provoke the sally;
and then there will always be remembered forms to continue to
guide the minstrel in his narrative. You cannot fight any sort of
battle In a ballad, but only the ballad-kind of battle:

The first stroke that's given, Sir Aldingar,

I will give unto thee,
and if the second give thou may,

look then thou spare not me.